BROADCAST BAN.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 76, 26 February 1938, Page 14

BROADCAST BAN.

MR COBBE’S CRITICISM. “Most of us have heard of the refusal to allow the broadcasting of the very fine sermon of Rev. Father Crowe,” commented Hon. J. G. Cobbe, in his speech at Feilding last evening. “The reverend gentleman was too outspoken for the powers controlling our broadcasting system. He called a spade a spade and exposed the cruelty, dishonesty and immorality of Communism. He quoted Stalin, who said ‘Communism will wage a campaign against Catholicism, against Protestantism and against Orthodoxy, in order to assure the triumph of the Socialist mentality.’ It was a remarkable circumstance that shortly after, the refusal to broadcast Father Crowe’s sermon listeners-in were advised to read a book that preaches atheism. “It has been truly said by the head of a great Christian Church that ‘the first, the greatest, the most general peril, is Communism in all its forms and degrees.’ Surely we are entitled to ask, why are Communists and certain advanced Socialists so bitterly opposed to every form of religion P Is it because religion is the citadel around which are entrenched liberty of thought, individual freedom, moral law, hatred of dictatorship, and the true liberty equality and fraternity which have been the dream and hope of agesP”